Contours of Culture

Irrigating Deserts

by Ken Myers

Many years ago, I had a conversation with philosopher and ethicist Gilbert
Meilaender about the work of C. S. Lewis. As we were discussing why Lewis was
such a compelling apologist, Gil said, “I think he’s not so much
trying to argue anybody into thinking something as he is simply trying
to understand what it would mean to believe something, through the
enormous gifts he has for illustration and metaphor and story.”

Lewis’s imaginative skills were thus focused less on the mere credibility
or plausibility of belief (which are the concerns of most apologists) and more
on the ramifications of belief: If the gospel is true, here is
how the world will look. Even “belief” had a more comprehensive
scope in his thinking than most apologists recognize. The gospel wasn’t
just a message about getting saved; it was a message of salvation in the
context of a bigger story about the meaning of everything. It presupposed
a cosmology and a rich anthropology. As in the Creed, Lewis’s defense
of the faith began with a tacit but rich affirmation of the Maker of heaven
and earth, who made all things in a particular way, the shape of which his
creatures would do well to honor.

As a great lover of stories, Lewis knew that Christianity had a big story
to tell. He also was acutely aware that there were fatally misleading ways
of telling the story about the world and all that is in it. The Screwtape
Letters is such a powerful work because Lewis described so well how all
of life looks from the viewpoint of a devilish tempter. In his fiction, many
of his villains are comprehensively wrong, not just mistaken on this
or that point of doctrine. The way they look at the whole of life is out of
whack. In The Narnian, Alan Jacobs observes that Lewis had a shrewd
eye for “what Marxists call ‘ideology,’ that is, the system
of beliefs that are so taken for granted in a given culture that hardly anyone
even notices that they are beliefs.”

Fatal Indoctrination

In all of his writings, Lewis always presented Christianity as something
that was true, and as something that should be embraced precisely because it
was true ( not because it was felt to be a ticket to happiness or
safety). The Christian account of God and Creation and Man and Sin was the
Way Things Really Are. So, as Jacobs observes, Lewis was profoundly troubled
by the fact that “after being indoctrinated into a systematic disregard
of truth and falsehood, people can find themselves unable to recognize the
difference even when it is put before them plainly.”

Such fatal indoctrination comes through many cultural conduits, and Lewis
damns them all at one time or another in his books: journalism, political rhetoric,
advertising, bad literature. But he seems to regard the false indoctrination
practiced by educators as the most insidious and pervasive. It was, Lewis makes
clear, the shape of his education that made Mark Studdock (in That Hideous
Strength) such a man of straw and so vulnerable to being corrupted.

Given Lewis’s concern about the disordering effect of misguided schooling,
it is not at all surprising to read the somber epigraph to the first chapter
of The Abolition of Man, a book whose subtitle identifies it as Reflections
on Education. Lewis begins his scathing critique of a common mentality
of modern educators by citing two lines from a fifteenth-century carol, “Unto
Us a Boy Is Born,” that suggest a Herodian quality in the teachers in
question: “So he sent the word to slay/ and slew the little childer.” The
pedagogical practices under scrutiny amount to a slaughter of the innocents.

A Dehumanizing Lie

The Abolition of Man is a powerful tract defending the assumption
that value judgments (in ethics, aesthetics, and everyday life) are tied to objective
reality. The book does not prove the reality of what Lewis calls “the
Tao” (and what others, as he points out, have called “Natural Law
or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the
First Platitudes”). Rather than offer proof for the Tao (which Lewis
says would be impossible, since there would be nothing higher to
appeal to in making such a proof), Lewis teases out what the world would look
like (and what Man becomes) if the subjectivists are right. If all value judgments
are expressions of mere feeling and preference, then human beings are merely
trousered apes.

Because feelings are so highly valued in modern culture, some Christians
assume that the response is to train reason so as to resist the blandishments
of emotion. Lewis strongly disagrees. “The task of the modern educator
is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defense against
false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments.”

Education rightly ordered must properly train the sentiments, sensibilities,
and affections of students. After all, “approvals and disapprovals are
. . . responses to an objective order,” and thus we should seek to align
our emotions with the Way Things Really Are. A person so trained will understand
that the chief end of a truly human life is to conform the soul to reality,
not (as the modern mind assumes) to attempt to remake reality to fit our desires.

Subjectivism is one of the deep, dehumanizing lies of modern culture. It
devalues emotion as well as reason, truth as well as tradition. Subjectivist
assumptions prevent many unbelievers from becoming believers, and they deter
many believers from living fully as believers. I think every Christian teacher,
pastor, and parent should wrestle with The Abolition of Man and ask
how teaching and the shape of everyday life should be altered if Lewis’s
prophetic warnings are true.

Ken Myers is the host and producer of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Formerly an arts editor with National Public Radio, he also served as editor of Eternity, the Evangelical monthly magazine, and This World, the quarterly predecessor to First Things. He is a contributing editor for Touchstone.

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